It Ain’t Over Until It’s Over

The big topic today seems to be the blowup between Trump and Vance on one hand, and Zelenskyy on the other.

On the one hand, the reactions to it all seem to fall into two categories: Trump is an idiot who got his clock cleaned by Zelenskyy, and Zelenskyy is a comedian who has no understanding of diplomacy.

The one thing no one seems to grasp is that it’s a negotiation that didn’t end when Zelenskyy left the White House yesterday.

But people are pretty uniformly convinced that it reinforces their existing notions about Trump and Zelenskyy. 

The most amusing one, at least to me, was someone who said “that’s it, it’s over,” and when I suggested that was premature, came back with “but of course, it can always be restarted.”

So I have some thoughts.

One. Nobody knows nuthin’. We don’t know what was in Zelenskyy’s mind, and we don’t know what was in Trump’s mind.

Two. People have been dismissing Trump as an idiot for, at this point, decades. This model of Trump has not turned out to be very predictive. 

Three. There are two keys to any negotiation: both sides have something they want, and both sides have limits to the deal they’ll accept.

Ukraine has something they definitely want: for Russians to stop blowing up their cities. Trump has something he wants: to stop a war that is an effective stalemate on terms that are advantageous to the United States.

In yesterday’s conversation, Trump and Vance went into it knowing that Zelenskyy wants further US support, and Zelenskyy apparently went into it under the impression that the best way to get further support was to bluster about the US not being nice enough.

And here’s the problem: Trump is a master negotiator who knows that you have to be willing to walk away from a deal.

Now, ignore everyone who says they know everything about the events yesterday and look at what happened.

Zelenskyy has now posted two tweets expressing his gratitude for everything the US has done — which is pretty much exactly what Vance excoriated him for failing to do in the Oval Office. We at the same time see some suggestions that Zelenskyy was being advised by people from the previous administration, such as Susan Rice, that he could get a better deal. So what it seems like we ought to infer is that Zelenskyy thought he could extract concessions from Trump by embarrassing him in public.

Trump, on the other hand, clearly has his own goals for a deal, and they’re actually largely economic. He wants to end a perpetual war that is absorbing hundreds of billions of dollars, and establish a relationship that will reverse the extended economic drain. 

Additionally, and I think secondarily, he wants to see the EU step up to their own defense. I don’t think there has been a lot of appetite in the EU’s member states to actually do that. But they have started at least to make noises about the need to really increase their defense spending.

Underlying the whole recent discussion is the assumption that all negotiations have ended, because if it doesn’t happen today, there is nothing that can ever possibly change. And that brings us to —

Four. Ukraine still needs US support. Trump still needs a deal that he can accept. And nothing is over.